When the Big Feelings Get Too Big
Who let them in here anyway?
I have all these feelings. They are big. If I were an illustrator I would draw myself with a giant sack of wet laundry on my back with the word "feelings" on it. My head is bent low in effort, but if you could see my face, the expression would be anguish.
They’ve been bad lately, and bigger than I’m used to. They’re so big and mean and nasty that all I can do is keep going and hope they’ll pass eventually. They always do.
But where do they come from? Well, that's a little harder to pin down. Some of it is self-inflicted. In sports terms, it's an unforced error. In the parlance of the internet, it's called a self-own. Nobody said anything or did anything with the intention of hurting my feelings — I did it all to myself.
I feel like a cat with a long tail in a room full of rocking chairs. The cat could just leave the room. The door is open, cat! Just walk through it! Why are you doing this to yourself?
But the pain of that rocking chair coming down on its tail is weirdly comforting. Or, if it's not comforting, it's familiar.
Sure, the cat could leave the room, but what's in the hall? What’s in the next room? What if that's even worse?
And then there's the little part of that cat that needs the attention it gets when it yowls. That's the hardest part of this to reckon with. Is that why I let these things get to me?
Or am I just being hard on myself about that, too?
I'll return to this in a moment, but for now, let's look at why I think this is useful to write about.
Don't Be Sad I Know You Will
I was going to stop writing about my feelings so much. I write about my interior life more than anything else and I never wanted that. I was ashamed. I kept thinking -- this is what I'm doing now instead of writing my novels or my stories? Every time I would start writing one of these I would jump in front of myself and tell me I was wasting my time. Who cares about any of this?
But then I looked at the stuff I enjoyed reading the most and it was all stuff like this. This, the newsletter you're reading, but also this:
"I rarely look in the mirror anymore, not for an extended period, lest I set myself up for a full day of isolation on my phone, pondering the steps I can take to not despair over my appearance: Nose job? Jaw enhancements? Hair plugs? Teeth whitening? Intermittent fasting? That barbaric surgery where they stretch out your leg bones to gain three more inches of height?
And then I start calculating if any of those alterations are worth it. How many "good years" do I have left to not feel like an ogre anyway?"
A.J. Daulerio, The Small Bow
I still wonder most days what it's like to have a body that's not awful. Body image was a topic in IOP (that's "Intensive Outpatient Program" for you fuzzy ducks who haven't gone to rehab), and I took the floor. I described how much I hated the sight of myself, how I defaulted to believing myself utterly loathsome, physically, and how I relied on attention to feel less so, if only for a moment. How I'd spent 24 years in long-term relationships in part to keep that ongoing drip of knowing someone out there wasn't revolted by me. There was a long silence. I'd gone deep. One woman said, "It's okay to cry."
Ben T. G., Hopping the Bus To Abelene
These are middle-aged men writing about their experiences and they resonate so much with me that I feel like I did when I was reading science fiction books and watching action adventure movies when I was a kid. I love how they make me feel and I want to make something that makes people feel that way, too.
I want to make somebody else feel the comaraderie and fellowship I feel when I read about other people like me. How do I feel when I read about A.J. and Ben and their own big feelings?
I feel like I'm not alone. I feel like there are other people out there who know what it's like to feel this stuff. Sometimes they figure out ways to deal with it, but sometimes they don’t.
Do You Want Sympathy or Solutions?
This is a good question to ask somebody when they tell you a bunch of bad stuff that’s happening to them, or when they’re complaining about their jobs, or when they’re telling you about their problems. It’s especially useful to people like me, who struggle sometimes with human interactions.
Sometimes we just want to get the bad stuff out of us and into the world and we need somebody to validate our feelings. We don’t want somebody to tell us how to improve our lives or feel better about things, we just want somebody to hear us and listen. We want a witness.
My therapist's name is Sandy. Everybody who knows me knows about Sandy. When they see me having a bad time, they don't ask "have you talked to somebody?" they ask me "have you talked to Sandy?"
Sandy knows me really well because he's been my therapist for over 20 years. He was my dad's therapist before he was mine, and since my dad was the origin of so many of my troubles, Sandy's insight and experience are particularly useful to me.
My dad started getting better after he started seeing Sandy. Sandy helped him connect with his own interiority and deal with the anxiety and depression that made him such a nasty person to his children and his wife.
In addition to his body shape, I inherited these from my dad. I have had terrible anxiety all my life. It got tremendously bad in my adolescence. I had daily panic attacks in college. I had trouble making friends because of it. If I suspected a girl liked me, they might as well have lit a stick of dynamite and dropped it into my limbic system.
All excitement, all arousal, was bad. I didn't know how to differentiate the good excitement from the bad. I was scared of pretty much everything, but I was especially scared of other people. I didn’t know how to handle their feelings or my feelings about their feelings.
I still struggle with them sometimes! Maybe more than sometimes.
The Day That Sandy Saved My Life
After graduating college, I moved to DC to live with my Aunt Posy and “find a job.” I put it in quotes because I didn’t have a plan and I had no idea how any of it was supposed to go.
I had an english degree and a vague idea that I could start a career. I didn’t know what that career was going to be or where I would find it. It didn’t matter, because I was too anxious to follow through on anything you do to find a job and I spent most of those days in Posy’s basement, smoking cigarettes and writing fiction that nobody read.
At the end of those six months, my mom suggested I come back home and start seeing a therapist. My dad had been seeing Sandy for a little while, and it had helped him. I returned to West Virginia at what was the lowest point of my entire life, and moved back in with my parents. My dad made me an appointment with Sandy and drove me to Pittsburgh from Wheeling.
I had been to therapists before, as a kid. Twice, actually, and neither one lasted very long. Those therapists were supposed to help me get along better with my dad. His work with Sandy, many years later, was proof that he needed the therapy as much as I did.
So I went into Sandy's office with trepidation and, of course, anxiety. I told him some version of the above, that I was so nervous all the time and didn't like myself and I was ashamed of what I looked like and who I was and I was resigned to living like that for the rest of my life. I had trouble talking to people I had known my whole life. I was scared of everybody, everything. I had never even held hands with a girl, let alone kiss one. I was never going to live a normal life.
"Jim, you have anxiety," he said. "I've helped many people with these things you're feeling. You're not alone, and you're not cursed, you just need a plan. Here's what we're going to do…"
I needed sympathy and solutions, and he gave me both.
I Need You To Witness Me
I don’t even need to know you’re out there. These newsletter are like prayers. That’s something else I’m coming to understand: prayer isn’t about somebody answering, it’s about the praying. A prayer names our suffering and lets us get our arms around it. A prayer asks the universe, the powers greater than us, to hear us, to witness us.
So What About My Big Feelings?
Oh right, I said I’d get back to this. I’m not expecting you, or the the wild, wide universe, to do anything but witness me. The universe doesn’t have a choice but you do. I’m worried that if I write what people don’t want in their inboxes, they’ll stop reading what I write.
Every time I write one of these I think nobody wants to read it and everybody will yell at me about it or, worse, nobody will say anything about it at all. But in the end, right before I hit “Send,” I say “fuck it.”
Because one of my continuing big problems is the approval I look for from other people. I shouldn’t need somebody to tell me I’m handsome or tell me they like my writing. That needs to come from inside me. This is my next challenge. I’ll write about it here, in addition to my writing challenges and all the other challenges that constantly challenge me lol.
That's a small version of why I decided it was okay to write about my feelings and post it here. It helps me, and maybe somebody will be helped by it, too.
We’re only as old as we’ve been told
And I’m not ready for the shelf
- Marika Hackman, Ophelia
Keep writing..we enjoy the flow of your thinking and, I guess it’s sentence structure..you’re the English major.
I did Not text IT’S